CES: A Flashy Dinosaur in an App-Driven World

Diego Romeu of 3M Touch Systems showed off an 84-inch touch table on Sunday at the Consumer Electronics Show.

This week’s Consumer Electronics Show is one of the largest tech events of the year. But when measured against the hottest trends in consumer technology, its stature is noticeably diminished.

In an era when hardware ruled the land, CES served as the premiere launch pad for the next big thing in electronics. Longtime CES attendees will tell you this is where the VCR, DVD player and Plasma TV got their start.

But in recent years the “techtonic” plates haves shifted from hardware to the software that powers our favorite gadgets and websites. The two biggest U.S. tech companies Apple and Google – notably absent from CES – have figured it out. It’s not enough to be a hardware company. To succeed in the digital economy, you must also create software.

Apple and Google know the key to their businesses is software, whether as the brains of devices or the services that help people do things. Apps are the main reason people buy the iPhone and iPad, or Android smartphones and tablets. Could you imagine getting anywhere without Google Maps, or finding something without Google Search?

Attendees walk through the lobby of the Las Vegas Convention Center prior to the opening of the trade show floor at the Consumer Electronics Show.

Many of the biggest CES product launches are coming from chipmakers – Intel Nvidia, AMD and Qualcomm (the main keynote address, taking over for departed Microsoft). Yes, these chips are critically important for controlling our devices, but does the average consumer care? Will these chips really be memorable?

Meanwhile, the biggest brands in tech – Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter – all do their business elsewhere, touting products at launches akin to Hollywood events. In recent years, CES missed on the iPhone and iPad, Amazon’s Kindle, the social networking and app craze.

Times have changed, and the ecosystem has shifted to a digital economy, dominated by apps that can one day launch and the next are in use by millions of people. Or by software that can unlock new super-human abilities that once weren’t possible, like paying for something without your wallet, or summoning a car from your phone. The hardware is simply a casing for the software we crave.

The buzz of an app needs no showy launch; it’s simply enhanced by the social Web. Take the latest Internet sensation: Snapchat, which has been on top of the Apple App Store for several weeks without the need of a launch event.

It’s easy to spread apps through augmentations like Twitter and Facebook. Even more so with the press of a button, thanks to Facebook’s “Like” button and “Tweet” buttons embedded in many apps. Sometimes it’s automatic — in the case of a filtered photo from Path, a mobile diary app, being published directly to Twitter with no additional friction.

Simply put, many of the biggest advances in technology in recent years have been software-based. The Facebook Platform, iOS and Android enabled the rise of entire businesses and ecosystems. Apple alone has paid out more than $7 billion to developers. The next wave of billion-dollar startups are social apps like Pinterest, an online scrapbook, and Airbnb, an app that lets home-owners rent out rooms to travelers. Or they solve some deep-seated headache, like in the case of mobile payments startup Square and file sharing and storing service Box.

CES may still be the largest show in technology in terms of attendance. But one thing is clear — it’s not simply about the electronics any more. We live in an app-powered world, and even the old guard is slowly starting to catch on. It remains to be seen if CES will catch on fast enough.